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US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to slash senior-most ranks of military
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- Title
- Exclusive: Pentagon to reduce 4-star positions by 20%, official says
- Published
- May 5 2025
This is the scariest news yet to come from this administration, and cannot be treated as ridiculous. The top brass of the US Armed Forces are far from perfect, and the USA has wielded its military to horrible effect many times, but these ranking officers (as a structural element) are very likely the only reason that the kinds of people chanting "just glass Iraq!" don't get their way.
The constitution is all well and good, civil services are important, but this is how totalitarianism and civil wars begin.
Edit: Reined in my hyperbole a bit.
Yeah the parallels with fascist governments always trying to get rid of the old guard are alarming to say the least.
Not sure whether this or replacing JAGs who might be roadblocks was worse.
I see a lot of focus here in the comments on the actual 'firings' of these generals (RIP - the highest rank in the US Navy), but it should also be brought into the light that merging AFRICOM with the European Command will 100% cripple our capabilities in both HOA and Europe. I assume the same for Southern and Northern Command. The entire reason each of these commands was created (or branched off) to operate individually is because the threats and security of that particular Area of Operations was deemed important enough to require the full attention of a command. Destroying this will kill our overseas capabilities and force projection into places our allies need us (Like Taiwan & Japan, HOA, Europe, The Middle East. Basically everywhere).
We can all look at the facts here and see a small group of radical loyalists gutting out stronger institutions from a place of authority before (I assume forthcoming in the next years) turning up the dial to eleven and stomping on our necks.
I am dead serious when I say that individual citizens (aka all of you here) should anticipate a major national/geopolitical event that will result in global conflict. We are getting to the part where you buy bags of rice and cans of salted meats to prepare for an economic crisis. (Not to toot the Doom Horn or anything, that's just how it is)
For others who also did not know:
AFRICOM: The United States Africa Command (USAFRICOM, U.S. AFRICOM, and AFRICOM)[4] is one of the eleven unified combatant commands of the United States Department of Defense
HOA: Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) is a joint task force of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM).
edited to add links
Not knocking your overall point, but the $150 billion proposal seems to be mainly for INDOPACOM. If anything, force projection seems to be pulled back from everywhere except the Taiwan strait.
I am excited at the prospect of getting these new ships, bombers, and sub (and some other goodies). You do make an excellent point on the current trend being to reduce our footprint in most areas.
I do want to debate more at a later point, because I am limited currently in what I can say for that particular sub-topic. It's just too current and I don't like having to tiptoe around certain words conversationally.
Will it? They've been merged at other levels for a long time.
For the duration that Africa was split between three commands, there were major problems because these commands all have larger AORs that require a majority of their attention. The purpose for establishing AFRICOM as its own sub-command was to have an independent group with a focus solely on this region. This is important for a few major reasons:
Countering Chinese and Russian influence in the region
Monitoring new and evolving threats to the homeland
To the first point, we can look at the influence of Wagner Mercenaries (Now under the Russian MoD as Afrika Corps) and Russian defense contracts, economic agreements, etc. coming out of countries like Sudan and Niger. We are seeing more anti-Western sentiment, more radicalism, a new recruitment pool for these countries to wage war with¹. Call me a warhawk, or paranoid, but if you know how to look, you can see certain choices are being made to set the stage for global conflict.
To the second: The area is more complex, more fluid, and more dangerous than it has been for some time. We could rattle off examples (Boko-Haram, Al-Shabaab, ISIS-A, whatever that new VooDoo pirate offshoot is). These kinds of things have always been revolving doors. An old group disbands, and a new one is formed from the remnants, often with similar goals and practices. But, now we have some new ingredients altering the recipe: The Russo-Ukrainian conflict, The Western withdrawal from Afghanistan (and the toys that were left behind), Southern/Central American arms smuggling (remember the "unconfirmed" story about MANPADs surfacing at the border?), social media as a recruitment tool, Information Warfare campaigns.
It requires full attention, because the stuff that is happening there now will find us at home.
If I left anything unclarified, I would be happy to remedy that. There are too many moving parts to cover in a single conversation. There are days worth of documentation to run through and argue about (and trust me, the powers that be have been doing exactly that). The merging has been under consideration for quite some time, and it has made me unhappy.
1: Yes, a lot of these arguments could help made for America and Friends™—but, the United States DoD wants to invest in the wellbeing of the individuals living within these countries. No, it's not for solely altruistic reasons, but at least we are doing it. It's a symbiotic relationship, and not parasitic like whatever is coming out of the Sino-Soviet region.
Loyalty purges. The trump administration wants a military that will obey the executive over the Constitution.
If they are allowed to conduct these purges to a deep enough extent... they may well get it.
After that? There is the saying, that 'political power grows out of the barrel of a gun'. They're already ignoring the courts and arresting judges. trump pretty clearly wants the power to do anything he wants with no checks and balances - a military that will just obey and a never-ending state of martial law would deliver that for him.
Yup. The press treating this as normal job losses, or even as the mafia-style quid pro quo that we’re seeing in who gets cabinet positions, is dangerously underselling what’s going on here.
This isn’t about rewarding loyalists or punishing dissenters within the ranks, awful as either of those lines of reasoning would already be. It’s about installing people who will unquestioningly obey orders when Trump wants them to open fire.
So... It's a slash and burn exercise designed to punish senior military officials for disagreeing with him, the President, or being a perceived "DEI" hire? Because it feels like when you have to say it isn't that, it is.
Just invert what they’re saying to get an accurate version of the truth.
Maybe Elon can save the country some money by replacing them with 19-year-old hackers.
Mirror: https://archive.is/Vy1Un